


A Lot Can Change in Eleven Years

by tacitcrow



Category: Layton Kyouju Series | Professor Layton Series
Genre: Arguing, Existential Crisis, Gen, Spoilers, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:01:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27648556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tacitcrow/pseuds/tacitcrow
Summary: SPOILER WARNING: This takes place after the current end of canon: the 50th episode of the anime series, and heavily references the third game in the series, Unwound/Lost Future. I have tried to provide enough context for the emotional beats of this story to land for those unfamiliar with these parts of Layton canon.This is a story exploring the series’ recurring motif of lost time. It’s mostly a character study centered on Luke, but there’s also kind of a conspiracy plot running in tandem with that, and some focus on Luke's relationship with his canon wife. (Not my area of expertise so any romantic scenes are very brief and platonic. lol)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	A Lot Can Change in Eleven Years

**Author's Note:**

> Other notes on content: There’s a lot of arguing, an in-the-moment description of a minor panic attack, and a little uncensored swearing, because I personally think it’s reflective of Clive's uncomfortable position in canon (and, honestly, a little funny) for him to swear a nonzero amount. This is in contrast to everyone else, who don’t say anything I’d be tempted to censor.
> 
> I think I should also warn you that I am in fact American (and have never not been), but I’ve made a cautious attempt to write this story in a way that isn’t 100% American. I can only hope that what I’ve written isn’t 100% cringeworthy. I can accept 75% though.

5:00.

The pale green light pried open Luke's eyelids for what felt like the millionth time that night. No, it was probably - definitely - only the fourth. He let out a low groan. Somehow the cloth he'd put over the clock last time had gotten knocked off. He'd tried ignoring the thing, he'd tried turning it away from him, he'd tried turning it on its face, and he'd finally pulled himself awake enough to find something to put over it, but the light of this digital clock he hadn't bought had always found a way back into his eyes.

Well, it was practically sunrise, and he had planned to make sure the sun did, in fact, rise this morning. Opening his eyes wide, he urged the clock's light to force him awake and cautiously lifted his wife's arm from his side.

His wife, Marina - if that's who this woman really was, but Luke didn't want to think about that - made a small noise, but otherwise didn't react. He didn't recall her being such a sound sleeper. He wished he could recall what she had looked like.

There ought to be photographs somewhere in the house.

The distance from the bed to the floor was slightly shorter than he expected, the floorboards creaked in places that he was certain would be solid, and though everything in his closet seemed to be where he had left it, it smelled wrong, somehow.

"Very convincing," he lied to himself. This was all his fault for becoming so exhausted during the ride home. He'd allowed himself to be driven to this place from an unfamiliar location, become distracted by this woman who seemed to be the same one he'd married, and had only thought to pay attention to the road signs once they'd turned onto the street that matched his legal address. Of course they'd gotten _that_ street name right, and the house number, and the blueprint of the place, but they couldn't recreate an entire city - not without getting something wrong, anyway. He'd catch this deception in those small mistakes. They couldn't simulate a real sunrise every morning. They couldn't perfectly deceive - or imitate - his wife. They couldn't replicate the exact weak spots of the floorboards.

And that obnoxious digital clock was not his.

After some deliberation, he threw on his rattiest bathrobe. If his house wasn't going to be itself, he couldn't be expected to be himself, either.

Luke tried not to shiver as he padded slowly down the hallway. He remembered there being fewer pictures hanging on the walls than there currently were. Evidently, someone had decided that his house needed a few more paintings of flowers and landscapes. They hung blithely at eye level, faint shades of yellow and green and blue, and they were unsigned. Would Marina have put these here?

A cursory examination uncovered no obvious meaning to these strange paintings, but their placement was undoubtedly suspicious. He should probably wait to try decoding them, though, until he had enough light to see them properly.

His study was, of course, exactly as he'd left it, except for how sun-faded everything looked, which must've been hard to fake. And someone had kept everything cleaned and polished, especially the wedding photo that sat on the shelf above his desk. It, too, seemed slightly faded, but there was not a speck of dust on the frame.

It was too easy to imagine Marina keeping the place clean for him, waiting for him to return, worrying over this photo.

What if he really had missed eleven years?

Luke forced his eyes closed and turned away from the picture. That's exactly what they wanted him to think. He couldn't let the implications of any of this get to him, not before he knew what was really going on.

His calendar, now presumably 11 years out of date, was still opened to the month he'd left home. Ironic.

His bag sat where he'd dropped it last night. Automatically, he took out his notebook and pencil, flipped on the (oddly dim) desk lamp, and recorded the state of the calendar, plus a few more of his impressions of his situation so far.

Then the big question: Was someone trying to convince him and the professor that eleven years had passed since they'd been taken to that underground chamber? If so, how far did this deception go? Who was in on it?

If not, how could he even begin to process-

"Luke?"

Her voice was soft and familiar, if a little ragged. As he turned to face her, he pulled the wedding picture down from its shelf so he could compare his wife's two faces. The one in the photo smiled warmly, distant behind glass, cheerful despite the now-faded colors and that photographer's insistence on "just one more" shot. The face in the doorway was marked by time and exhaustion, yet unmistakably similar. Uncanny, but more than a little convincing. If this person wasn't her, they'd found the perfect actress - or done a very good job editing this photo.

She squinted in the dim light, took a hesitant step into the room. "Did you manage to get any sleep?"

He dropped the photo onto the desk behind him. "Yeah! Some." A nervous laugh escaped him as she approached. "You'd think I'd be less exhausted after eleven years of sleep." He watched her reaction carefully. She just looked concerned, coming to a stop a couple of feet away from him, just out of the circle of light the lamp cast onto the floor.

He clicked the light off and moved away from the desk; she looked startled, and automatically he put an arm around her, made a motion to the door. "I was thinking about watching the sun rise," he said.

She nodded, so they followed one another to the table, where the house's largest east-facing window let pre-dawn light into the kitchen. Nearly every surface was covered in an unfamiliar mess. Among empty cups and dust-covered books sat a laptop, a couple well-used notepads, an overflowing recipe box, a collection of potted plants, and a couple of cardboard boxes full of unopened mail.

His wife shifted uncomfortably as this scene came into view, pulling away from him with a groan. "Oh, honey, I'm sorry. I thought I cleaned up more of this last night." In sudden embarrassed alertness, she scooped up all the empty cups and deposited them in one of the few uncluttered areas next to the sink. "Should I start making some tea, or, um, breakfast?"

"Don't worry about it; it's-" A glance at the now-clearly-glowing horizon distracted him. Pushing aside a chair, he hurried to the window just in time to catch the first rays of sunlight illuminating a few distant rooftops. Slowly, so slowly it was barely perceptible, the sky began to lighten and the sunlight slowly crept downward. The sky, at least, appeared to be real. Of course, it'd be better to go outside and make sure-

A hand lightly touched his arm. His companion had joined him at the window, looking very concerned. "I feel kind of silly asking this," she muttered at him, "but are you feeling okay?"

"I'm fine." Luke turned toward her in what he hoped was a reassuring way. But her hand didn't leave his arm, and her eyes slowly drifted away, down toward the windowsill. What was she expecting him to say? With a small sigh, he turned to face the sunrise again. "Actually, I've been through something like this before."

"What? Really...?!" Now she turned to face him.

"It was one of the times... before my family moved to America. I used to call it 'The Adventure of the Unwound Future.' I don't think I would've told you about it." He glanced over at her. In fact, he knew he hadn't told her about it. (Unlike so many of the other 'adventures' he'd been a part of, the one where a deranged millionaire had tried impersonating him was difficult to look back on fondly.) So if she were an impostor who'd been overzealous in her research - or, he reluctantly supposed, she were actually his wife Marina who had, for some reason, read through everything in the house while he'd been gone -

"...No, that doesn't sound familiar."

So much for that. "Do you remember that terrorist attack about ten- I mean, er... twenty years ago?"

"You mean the one where that huge-"

"-the huge machine burrowed up from under London, yes."

She nodded at him, confused.

"Well..." Luke faltered for a moment. An explanation of this might just worry her more; but, it would be the perfect slap in the face to a hypothetical impostor. "Well, the place it burrowed up from was built to be a facsimile of London, which was used to convince people they'd travelled 10 years into the future. Professor Layton and I were led down there, and we believed it, too, for a couple of days." He scrutinized his companion's reaction. She made no sudden moves, didn't wince in fear of being caught, didn't rush to reassure or distract him. She just stood there, worry slowly spreading across her face. It took several seconds for her to reply. When she did, her voice was barely above a whisper.

"That's awful. Why would someone do something like that?"

What a suspiciously long pause for such a normal-sounding response. Luke narrowed his eyes. "The question is, why would someone do something like that to the same people twice?"

"What? Twice?"

"Tell me. Where are we, really?"

She seemed confused, desperate. "Luke, this is our home-"

"Right! Sure, it might look that way, but the floorboards are wrong!"

"What? Floorboards...?"

"And that digital bedside clock, and the paintings in the hallway-"

She had taken a step toward him, reached out an arm. "Luke, if you don't like them, I'll put them away-"

He crossed his arms, backing away from her. "Everything smells wrong! And you-"

She froze mid-step, hand still outstretched, eyes wide, saddened. Afraid.

"I can't even be sure of who you are."

As his voice jaggedly trailed off, Luke suddenly became aware that he was shaking. No part of him could be held still. His crossed arms trembled; his fingers tensed; his heartbeat blended in with his shuddering breaths. Tears pricked at the edges of his eyes. He blinked to hold them back.

She was shaking her head. "Don't you remember yesterday? You talked to everyone, and you didn't- Are you sure you're okay?"

"I don't know!" His voice was trembling, too. Maybe speaking more quietly would stop it. "I don't know; yesterday is kind of a... a blur. I didn't keep track of the road signs; you could've taken me anywhere-!"

"You really think I've been lying to you?" Oh god, she sounded just as scared as him.

"I don't know what to think!"

For a split second, he forgot he was holding back tears and they escaped, running quickly down his face. Immediately he wiped a sleeve over them and tried to prevent more from taking their place.

"Luke, I promise I would not lie to you about this. I'm sorry I- I can't really know how hard this is for you, but please believe me." Her voice reached a high, scratchy pitch, a harsh echo of the one he remembered. "It's been hard for me, too. It's been hard for... for everyone." She gestured at nothing in particular, but his eyes were led to the boxes of mail. Eleven years' worth of mail, clearly addressed to him. "I'm sorry things aren't like you remember them, but you can't expect- you can't expect nothing to have changed while you were gone..."

She was still standing, distant, when he looked back up at her. It was hard to make out, in the dim morning light, whether she was crying.

He took a step toward her on instinct, then paused, with a glance at the mail. He tried to remember yesterday. Faint impression of a hospital, this woman beside his bed. Scrambling to be let out alongside the professor, delirious drive to a mansion on the tail of a man who fell into a river. Wait. Before the river, hadn't there been a Katrielle, and a few other people they'd talked to? Everything was so hazy, and all the blurrier spots in his memory were filled with doubt.

"I'm sorry," he said, turning toward the woman who was too worried about him to approach him. Immediately his eyes slid away from her, unable face her directly. "I'm sorry; I just don't want to believe- not because of you," he added, because he really couldn't be sure how upset she was, "but because it's- it's-" There had to be a better way to say this, but the right words eluded him. "This is entirely my fault."

She stumbled forward. "No, no! I had a whole decade to get you out of there; I had everything ready but I never managed to get close enough to- and besides, don't you remember I was the reason you and Layton had to let yourselves-"

"I can't blame you for that!" From the sound of her voice, she _had_ been crying; he couldn't bear to let her go on. "Those cult... people were so heavily armed I don't think any of us really stood a chance."

The sun was now just high enough to illuminate fresh teardrops on her cheeks. "I really tried to get you out of there, you know; I- I missed you."

"Marina-" He still couldn't be sure that's who she was, but he couldn't keep from saying it. And he couldn't stop himself from embracing her, and apologizing again, and saying, very foolishly, that he'd missed her too.

Breakfast was a mess. On its first use the lid of the salt shaker came loose, rendering the eggs almost inedible and ensuring they'd have to clean the kitchen as well as the table before they could eat. By the time they'd cleared away the salt and the clutter the whole meal had gotten cold. But they had a pleasant time complaining and laughing about these quotidian misfortunes as the sun crept up into the sky. It was almost enough to make Luke forget he had to make sure all this was real.

He had to talk to the professor.

"I'm not sure he HAS a phone." Luke was yelling through his office doorway while his companion washed the dishes.

"Why wouldn't he?" She called back.

"I don't know; I've just never seen him with one!" He dug through to the back of the drawer though he was certain his address book wouldn't be there. "And he's never given me a number; I just assumed he didn't have a phone!"

"Still, it seems weird to just drive over there... What if he's out?"

"Then I'll wait for him to come back! He can't be out all day." Another drawer searched and no sign of the address book.

"That could take hours! You could be waiting all day!"

"I can wait."

"What if he comes here while you're out?"

He closed the final desk drawer. Still nothing. "Then let him in and call me!"

"What if I want to come with you?" She was standing in the doorway now, drying her hands on her jeans.

"Well-" He plopped down in the desk chair. "I can't find where I wrote his home address anyway, so..."

"Wouldn't your address book be in your bag?"

He snatched the bag off the floor. Indeed, there was the address book, in a folder with stamps and envelopes that hadn't been used on his trip. And there was the address he vaguely remembered. He shook open a map and sought out the street name.

A soft laugh came from the doorway. "I almost forgot you're allergic to technology."

He scowled, embarrassed. "I just want to be sure the main streets still match up."

"How old is that map?" She crossed the room, peered over his shoulder.

Now that he thought about it... "-Oh, it's from before I moved. So I guess some of this will have been rebuilt..." He put a hand over the place where that machine had torn the ground open. "But I don't think I'll have to drive through there..."

Slowly, his companion set a phone down onto one edge of the map. A smaller-scale map was onscreen, and a little green line helpfully outlined the exact route he'd need to take. Luke sighed at it.

She was smiling nervously at him. "Is it okay if I come along?"

"I was kind of planning to have a private conversation-"

"Well, I... I don't plan on butting in, or- or eavesdropping, if you don't want me in the room, but I just..." She shook her head and retrieved her phone. "Sorry, I sound crazy."

"Do you want to talk to him, too?"

She gave a small laugh. "It's not that. I just... You don't have to go alone."

He turned to face her, attempted a smile. "I don't plan on disappearing again, if that's what you're worried about."

Her fingers tightened on her phone, gripping it like a stress ball.

He decided to focus on folding the old map back up. "I just want to ask about yesterday, make sure this is all... you know..."

"...real?"

He nodded. "And then... commiserate, I guess."

"That makes sense." Her feet hesitantly shuffled backwards. "Just... don't let him talk you into leaving again, okay?"

By the time he looked up at her she was in the doorway, still facing him, worried, distant. He stood up and tried to look as sincere as possible. "I'll be back here before the end of the day. I promise you that." He slung one of the backpack straps over his shoulder and headed towards where she was standing. One of her hands laid on the doorframe, softly blocking him from leaving. It seemed to take her a moment to realize that she was doing this; after an uneasy glance she dropped her hand and stepped backward into the hallway.

"Drive safe," she said.

The car they had owned eleven years ago had evidently been replaced. Not that it mattered; he hadn't been emotionally attached to the thing; in fact, he barely remembered what it had looked like, but the knowledge that this wasn't it -

Luke shook his head and shoved the key into the ignition. Don't worry about it. Just go.

After the suspense of the first few (unchanged) streets passed, the drive settled into uneasy routine. Watch the road, drive a few blocks, note the street signs, check the map. The professor's home was a surprisingly short distance away as the crow flies, but the network of streets that should've accommodated Luke's route had been reworked, over the course of who knows how many years, into a tangle of one-way signs and pedestrian-only areas. Part of him relished the distraction of having to navigate through this mess, because all the rest of him was increasingly convinced that an extra decade had indeed passed him by.

He pulled up in front of the place a little after 8 and threw himself, shivering, out of the car. Marina was right. It was weird showing up unannounced. And what good would it do him, really? Some extra confirmation that what had happened yesterday was real? He took quick, deliberate steps up the sidewalk before he could truly change his mind. He had driven all the way here, after all. It'd be a waste to have spent all that time navigating just to drive home. And now the steps up to the front door were under his feet. Doing a 180 halfway to the doorstep, getting back in the car, and driving away would look even weirder than knocking, provided anyone was watching. And he couldn't be sure that no one was.

He knocked on the door.

Silence.

Luke realized, suddenly, that he'd been holding his breath. He let it out in an aggravated sigh and told himself to relax, but his breath caught again when the door opened.

"Luke! To what do I owe the pleasure?" Polite as ever, but god did he look tired. The embarrassment of making this observation left Luke with no answer for the question he just realized he'd been asked, and perhaps the professor noticed this because he followed with, "Is something wrong?"

"Yes!" It came out more urgently than Luke intended, so he shook his head and tried to laugh. "Not really. I mean, it's not like the world's ending, but-"

"Come in," the professor sighed.

Before the move, Luke had been here with his parents several times for dinners and discussions about archaeology-related topics. (During the latter, he'd been set to work on puzzles to prevent him from being too disruptive.) Little appeared to have changed since then; although, now that he was older, he did have a better view of the clutter that covered every table and cabinet. He was led to a seat and offered the usual hospitality, and as a sense of normalcy was finally creeping over him a woman stepped out of a hallway and screamed.

She looked about college-age, with long red hair and - oh, right, this was probably Katrielle.

Probably-Katrielle quickly regained her composure and muttered a hasty apology. "I'm used to waking up in an empty house." Facing her father the professor with a nervous shrug, she broke into an enormous grin when he answered her with a smile. Then she trotted away toward another part of the house. "Hello, Uncle Luke!"

Weird being called 'uncle' by someone practically his age. "Hi."

As she bustled around in the next room over, the professor calmly took a seat across from Luke. They sat in silence for several minutes, sipping the tea the professor had (of course) prepared, and slowly it became possible to relax again. Just as the silence began to feel uncomfortable, the professor gently broke it.

"So what brings you here?"

Luke carefully set his cup down. "It's about yesterday. I... It was all sort of a blur for me. I'm having trouble remembering what happened." No response, just concern. He continued: "So... I just wanted to make sure... were we really cryogenically frozen for eleven years?"

The professor nodded solemnly. "Yes, I'm afraid so."

"This isn't some sort of elaborate scheme-?"

"No, Luke."

"And- And you checked? You're sure?!"

The answer came with a look of profound exhaustion. "I could not be more certain. Difficult as it may be to believe, I see no other possible explanation for the situation in which we now find ourselves."

Luke leaned heavily on the back of the chair, tried to tell himself that this is what he'd expected to hear.

"It troubles me that you can't recall yesterday's events. Have you had any other unusual symptoms since awaking yesterday?"

"Er... No. I don't think so." A memory came to him then of the man who'd fallen into the river, the one other person who'd been frozen as they had, but for far longer. Something had gone wrong when that man had woken up; he'd tried to rush the process, stepped out of the vault with preservative still running through his veins. And hadn't his eyes bled purple and blue, his stone-stiff fingers broken clear through a wall, convulsions thrown him into the river, dead, perhaps, even before he hit the water? "Nothing like that... that man yesterday."

The professor smiled, relieved. "Ah, so you do remember something."

"I think I'm probably just in shock." Luke tried to smile back, but shrugging this off didn't feel like the right thing to do. "I can't- I don't want to believe it happened. It's such a long time-!"

"...Yes."

Another silence settled over them, longer than the last. Even Katrielle was quiet, wherever she was.

Luke decided to break the silence this time. "How is Katrielle handling this, by the way?"

"Admirably." The professor smiled distantly. "And how is your wife -- Marina?"

"O-oh, she's fine." That didn't sound at all convincing. And anyway, it was probably better to be honest. "I think I scared her earlier this morning; I was acting a little paranoid..."

"...because you weren't certain any of this was real?"

"Basically. Yes." Agitated, Luke stumbled to his own defence. "Not without good reason! I mean, we were lied to about this sort of thing before..."

"Before? Ah, yes." Layton's dark eyes somehow managed to look darker.

"So you see why I'd think -- without really being awake, or remembering -- that the same thing had happened again!"

This outburst resulted in another uncertain silence, which was, at length, interrupted by the distant ring of a telephone.

So the professor did have a phone, after all.

The professor made moves to excuse himself, but before he could get to his feet his daughter had already scooped up the phone and answered with a cheery "Layton residence!" So he settled into that distant look again and the silence lengthened.

Then rapid footsteps approached, and Katrielle stuck her head into the doorway. "It's for you," she chirped, gesturing for Luke to follow her. For him? He exchanged a confused glance with the professor, but quickly obliged.

The phone was an old corded thing that sat half-buried on a kitchen counter; its uncradled receiver rested perilously on the spine of an open book. Katrielle offered it to him with a little curtsy and waltzed out of the room.

"Hello?"

"LUKE!" It was his mother's voice on the line. "Oh my god, is it really you?"

"Yes?"

"Don't you dare put down that phone. Clark!" She was yelling away from the receiver now. "He picked up! He's there!"

Luke wasn't sure he was ready for this conversation.

"There; I've put it on speaker," his mother announced, triumphant. "Luke, say 'hello' again."

"Hello..."

It was his father who answered this time. "Luke! Hello!" He sounded a little tired. "It's so good to hear your voice again."

"Yours, too." It surprised Luke how honest it felt to say this.

"We've just been talking with Marina," his father explained. "She said you'd gone to see Hershel, and we were planning to call him later, too, so we figured..."

"Why wait?" his mother cut in with an audible smile.

"So, how are you?" his father inquired.

"Oh, I'm alright." Luke fiddled nervously with the phone cord. "Have you heard about the whole... cryogenic situation?"

"Yes; Marina called us while you were busy yesterday." There was a strange emphasis in the way his father said the word 'busy.' "I hope it won't be too much of a shock when we visit-"

Luke almost dropped the phone. "You're coming to visit?!"

"Of course, son! We haven't seen you in over a decade."

"Er, right. When-"

"Sometime tomorrow. We're already at the airport."

His mother chuckled. "Why else would we be up at 3 AM?"

Oh, right. Time zones. "Well, thanks for letting me know..." Why was everything happening so fast? This was exhausting.

His unenthusiastic reply had worried his father. "You don't already have plans tomorrow, do you?"

"No, no, it'll be nice to see you. But-" Luke sighed. "It's been a weird couple of days."

After a second of reflective silence, his mother replied, "Well, when we see you, we'll try to help you de-weird-ify things."

A small laugh escaped him. "Thanks, Mum."

"So, do your best to relax today, and we'll bother you tomorrow afternoon."

"...Right." And that was that, he supposed. "You said you wanted to talk to Professor Layton?"

"Well," his father started, but his mother interjected, "No, he can wait."

"You're sure?"

"We'll call him later this evening," his father confirmed, turning away from the phone. "I think our flight will be boarding soon."

His mother muttered her assent. "We're going to need more time for _that_ conversation..."

Luke let out a long sigh. "Please don't blame everything on him again..."

"Sorry; what did you say?"

"I said, please don't blame the professor for this whole situation! I agreed to go along. Neither of us really knew what we were getting into; it's just as much my fault as it is his, so-"

"Then you can tell us what you thought you were getting into?"

A heavy dread settled onto Luke's shoulders. He'd known this was coming. He'd known it every step of the way, as decisions were made, as doors closed behind him, as the time away from home stretched on and the stakes inched higher. Every step forward had been a step into danger, yet backing out had never seemed like the better option. After all, they'd gone so far already...

"Well?" His father's voice trembled slightly, a mixture of fury and fear. Concern, that was the word. Intense concern.

Luke took a deep breath. "I... I did sort of know what I was getting into. I knew it would be dangerous, and that we'd be away for a while. I mean, we had to take a boat..." Silence. Concern. He continued. "But I didn't think it would be this long before I got back, and I never could've guessed about the... the cryogenic situation." Another deep breath. "But I decided to go, and I kind of enjoyed it at first, because it was nostalgic for me, I guess, but... at some point it just felt like the right thing to do, to see it through to the end."

All quiet on the other end of the line. Before they could find anything substantial to say, Luke decided he should try to appease them.

"I'm really sorry things turned out this badly. I-"

"Did you find what you were looking for?"

That was his mother, pragmatic as always. "No." And as for the question that answer implied... "But I don't think we'll be looking for it any more."

After a couple more mundane exchanges, the phone was back in its cradle, and Luke was leaning heavily on the nearest wall. How had he managed to sound so certain about that? It wasn't that simple.

Or wasn't it? Did he really want to continue the search for Katrielle's biological family alongside the professor? That is, assuming the professor still wanted to continue the search, which Luke couldn't truly be certain about. Maybe all this had convinced him this was one mystery not worth solving. Maybe Katrielle had talked some sense into him. Maybe...

When Luke returned to the room, Layton was sitting in exactly the same manner, with what looked like the exact amount of tea left in his cup, as when Luke had left. Luke gestured back towards the phone. "My parents. Marina told them I was here." He plopped back down in the chair. "They called her first, of course..." His own teacup was empty. That's odd; he didn't remember finishing it.

"Katrielle accidentally drank some of your tea," the professor explained. "This is a new cup." And so, lifting the teapot from the table, he filled it. "How are Clark and Brenda?" he asked, before Luke could react.

"Oh. They're-" he shrugged. "Same as always. They're actually on a plane over here as we speak."

The professor laughed, almost looking relieved. "They must have caught the first flight they could!"

Luke echoed his laugh. "Yeah. They'll probably call you later this evening."

Thoughtfully, the professor raised his cup, and his smile subsided. "I'm sure they'll have much to say about this situation."

"I told them not to blame you for it!" Luke sat up and faced him with what he thought would be a reassuring look. "I said I agreed to go along, and I knew how dangerous things would probably end up being, which is true, by the way, in case there's any doubt."

"You'll find none here," murmured the professor, who was smiling again.

"So don't let anyone blame you for anything that happened to me, because that's all my-" But Luke faltered halfway through this assertion; the professor had turned away from him, deep in thought.

Slowly, he began to speak. "Do you remember, about a week into the search, when you told me that some mysteries might be better left unsolved?"

Luke hesitated before nodding.

"Do you think things might have turned out better if I had agreed with you then, and suggested that we head back home?" It sounded like he was going to say more, but his eyes were watching Luke for an answer.

"I- well, sure, if we'd have gone home right then- but would you have been satisfied with that? You said you wanted to keep going for Katrielle's sake."

"But, as a result of that decision, I was absent for eleven of the most formative years of her life. An ironic result of a decision that was, perhaps, regrettable."

What was he getting at? "But that's how things turned out, so we'll just have to... figure out how to move on from here." No response. "Right?"

It seemed, at first, that this was what the professor wanted to hear. But his response was, "Perhaps." With the gravity of the first rock to fall in an avalanche, he took a small piece of paper from his pocket and laid it on the table. On it, in unfamiliar handwriting, was a London address and the words "Ministry of Temporal Affairs."

Luke picked it up, made sure he'd read it correctly. "Temporal Affairs"?

The professor nodded.

"But that sounds like they deal with time travel-"

"Indeed they do."

Luke's head spun. "Why-"

"What we have experienced, or rather, haven't experienced in the past eleven years is apparently sufficiently analogous to temporal displacement to fall under their purview."

It was very, very tempting, in his exhausted state, to not bother trying to parse that sentence, but his pride (which remained stubbornly intact no matter how incapacitated the rest of him might be) prevented him from simply uttering a 'what.' With weary effort, he pried the two most confusing words out of the mess and threw them back at the professor. "Temporal displacement?"

"In our case, moving forward eleven years without being affected by the passage of time. We are, effectively, stranded in a time unfamiliar to us. The Ministry's purpose is to record experiences such as ours, and ensure displaced persons can adjust to the times they find themselves in, but it also manages... relocation."

"So-" The confused fog in Luke's mind was slowly clearing; the professor's earlier strange remarks came into sharp focus. "You're not suggesting we go back eleven years and prevent all this-?!"

The professor closed his eyes. "I leave that decision to you."

Oh... great.

"It was my decision eleven years ago that resulted in our current situation, so I leave it to you to reverse that decision, if you so choose."

The paper Luke held in front of him remained perfectly still. So his hand couldn't be trembling, but the words on the paper blurred anyway. How could he possibly make a decision like that?!

"In any case, you will need to visit the Temporal Affairs office," Layton continued blithely. "They were in quite a hurry to have us both in last night, but I managed to convince them you were far too tired to withstand an hour of interviews and paperwork. I'd planned to call you about this later this afternoon, but... well, here you are." The usual smile followed.

"Right."

"I realize this is a very weighty decision," He didn't say! "but I trust you to consider it carefully; and, Luke, I assure you, I will think no less of you whatever choice you make."

Luke focused, very intently, on folding the little piece of paper in half and putting it in his pocket. "I guess I should head over there, then."

"If you think you're ready-"

"Yes, I think so." Ready to investigate what on earth this 'Ministry of Temporal Affairs' thought it was up to.

The walk back to his car was deliriously short. In even less time, the address was reread, the map consulted, and Luke was on his way to the most ominous-sounding place in the entire city.

He considered, when he'd made it about halfway there, that perhaps he should've taken Marina along, or at least consulted her about the decision, but on second thought, no. He wasn't going to make a decision on this TODAY. They couldn't force him to make this decision right away, and if they tried, well...

Well, all right. If he had to decide right this instant, what would he choose? Continuing to patch things up after eleven years of absence, or going back to rewrite the past and live out those eleven years, however they happened?

How would rewriting the past even work, he wondered? Would he and Layton have to convince their past selves to go back home? That might be difficult... Or would they simply take their place? Would they have to dispose of their doubles, or just... wait for them to be frozen?

By the time he arrived, all these anxious speculations had gathered into a low buzz at the back of Luke's mind. He swept into a parking spot, scrambled out of the car and strode with grim suspicion into the most unassuming government building he'd ever seen.

The reception area was sparse, more out of neglect than some minimalistic choice. Old stains peppered the whitewashed walls, and the upholstery of the few chairs that were pushed up against them was similarly grubby. There were no signs of any sort, no visible building directory, and, most oddly of all, no tables except the front desk. The desk was clean, but not polished, and the same could be said of the person sitting behind it, who looked neither pleased nor surprised to see him. For a moment Luke wondered if he was in the wrong place.

Meekly, he approached the desk. "Ministry of Temporal Affairs?"

The receptionist grunted. "ID?"

Luke noticed, as he fumbled for his wallet, that there was a newspaper clipping laying, almost out of view, in a half-opened drawer to the receptionist's left. When the receptionist took his card, they compared it to this clipping, which Luke had initially noticed because his picture was on it - a report on the events of last night. They had made the news. Of course they had.

The receptionist had soon returned his card and raised an unimpressed eyebrow. "You have a letter from the minister?"

"I... don't think so."

The receptionist settled further into their seat.

"Wait." Luke took out the small handwritten note. "Does this count as a letter? It's not signed-"

The receptionist took one look at the note and pointed their arm down a barren corridor. "Take the stairs down to the second basement level. Third door on the left."

"Thank you," Luke stuttered, then tried to regain some of his fury as he strode away and flung himself through the door to the stairwell.

The second basement was somehow even dingier than the reception area. This was mostly due to the state of the ceiling lights, most of which were in their last, yellowest stages of working properly. A couple of them spent more time off than on.

Flung wide by his furious entrance, the stairwell door slammed loudly behind him.

"Watch the door," droned someone from down the hallway.

Luke marched up to the third door on the left. Oddly enough, it was open. "Is this the Ministry of Temporal Affairs?"

"Yes!" answered the same voice as before. "They won't let us put up any signs."

The voice came from a man who sat, reading a newspaper, behind a very cheap-looking desk. The man himself looked considerably less cheap, but he was a little frayed around the edges, as if he'd stayed up all night - which, given the professor's account of the late-night interview and the title on the desk's nameplate, could in fact be the case.

The name above that title was "Clive Dove."

No.

The impostor, the deranged millionaire who had impersonated Luke an impossibly long time ago, laid the newspaper down on his desk and stood up to greet him.

Luke stood frozen in the doorway. "HOW ARE YOU NOT IN JAIL?!"

"Fucking hell," answered Clive, pressing two fingers to his temples. "Is it your goal to be the loudest person alive?"

Luke seethed.

The impostor returned to his seat. "If you had kept up with the news, you'd know I dropped an egregious amount of money on a decent attorney. Surely you've heard rich people can buy their way out of their problems? I thought I'd try it. I'm still angry it actually worked, to be honest." He was gazing steadily at Luke. Luke glared back.

"But... you... are... a... terrorist."

"Was. More than twenty years ago, I might add-"

"You destroyed a huge part of London! People DIED because of-"

"I know. Infuriating what people will let rich idiots get away with, isn't it?"

Luke wasn't going to let him off that easily. "WHY ARE YOU THE MINISTER OF TIME-?!"

"-Temporal Affairs," the impostor sighed, "And there's really only one other person who works here."

Luke scoffed. "And who's that? Jean Descole?"

Clive raised an eyebrow. "No. Just someone to manage all the paperwork." His eyes flicked to a cluster of file cabinets on the opposite side of the room.

"Even so," Luke growled, "Your position implies that you have access to time machines."

Clive answered him with a weary nod.

"You!" continued Luke, who could only assume the impostor wasn't getting the point, "Of all people!"

Clive waved a hand at a chair across from his desk. "Could you take a seat, please?"

Luke stood his ground. "Give me one good reason why I should trust you."

"I can't. I mean, be honest, is there a reason you'd accept?" His eyes were dull, and forever, it seemed, on the verge of rolling. He leaned forward, one arm on the desk. "I could tell you nearly all my fortune's gone, that I believe holding this woefully understaffed and underfunded public service agency together is a more effective way to atone for my past actions than rotting in jail for decades, that the only reason they let me work here is because I'm one of maybe twenty living people who are certain of the fact that time travel is possible, that the only reason I'm the Minister is because the previous one was shot. But you have no way of verifying any of this, because you can't read my mind and the government likes to pretend that this embarrassing little Ministry doesn't exist."

Luke took a step forward into the room. "But you're the one who talked to the professor last night?"

This seemed to put Clive more at ease. "I certainly was."

Further steps forward. Hand on the back of the flimsy metal chair. "Why did _he_ trust you?"

The answer came with a short laugh. "Hell if I know."

Luke sat in the chair, and Clive went to open one of the filing cabinets. On a closer look, the impostor's expensive-looking suit was quite faded, even approaching threadbare at some of the seams. He had formerly been around ten years older than Luke (one of the reasons why his impersonation of Luke, and his lie about that facsimilied city existing ten years into the future, had been so convincing back then) but now, given 'recent' events, that age difference had doubled. He must be in his mid-forties now, a fact evidenced by the flecks of grey poking through his hair.

The impostor set a file folder of photocopied documents on the desk, separated out a few individual pages, and slid these across to Luke along with a pen. "Shall we get this over with?"

"Do I have a choice?"

Clive considered this for a moment. "Not really, no."

In a haze of fresh exhaustion, Luke picked up the pen.

"So. A quick overview of your situation." Clive read off a page from the top of the pile. "Due to an inadvertent cryogenic freezing, and subsequent thawing, process, you have functionally experienced time travel, skipping forward about eleven years." His eyes flicked to Luke for a moment, then back down to the page, then off into the distance. Such a long pause seemed strange at first, but Luke realized, with growing dread, that there could only be one reason for it.

"Don't say it," he growled.

Clive snapped to attention. "What? Say what?" He straightened his tie - a nervous tic of his, if Luke remembered correctly.

"Whatever stupid joke you were about to make just then."

Clive looked mildly scandalized. "As a matter of fact, I was trying to think of a polite way to say that you have some previous experience with-"

"There is no polite way for _you_ to say that."

After a moment of reflection, Clive gave a surprisingly solemn nod. "Fair enough. Anyway..." He waved a hand at the documents he'd placed in front of Luke. "What you're looking at is the standard set of forms for temporal displacement. Fortunately, your particular incident doesn't actually involve time travel, so I didn't have _much_ trouble verifying Layton's account of it last night." He said this with a flippant grimace. The theory that Clive had pulled an all-nighter was looking more likely. "I've filled out most of these just based on that; if there's anything you want to add, or think needs changing..."

Luke was fairly certain that what little he could remember wouldn't contradict with what the professor had said, but he ran a cursory glance over the first few pages. Most of the sections were marked "N/A" or left blank; the ones that weren't described things in a way that was almost entirely indecipherable. "No, this looks... accurate."

Clive moved to one side, as if he were trying to peer over Luke's shoulder from across the desk. "Are you sure? There's a section on page 12 about physical and mental health that I obviously couldn't fill out for you. You haven't had any unusual aches or pains since waking up? Numbness? Nausea?" When Luke quietly shook his head, Clive's voice took on a more pointed tone. "Lack of muscle control? Anxiety? Paranoia-"

"I'M FINE!" Luke hadn't meant to say it so loudly, so he said it again. "Really. I'm fine."

Clive didn't seem convinced. "You know you can't get resources to help you with issues you don't report."

What did he think he knew about Luke that Luke didn't?! "I understand that. I'm not having any issues."

After another doubtful glance, Clive conceded. "If you're certain everything looks accurate, go ahead and sign here on each page." He fished out another form as Luke did so.

When Luke had finished signing, the completed forms were swept back into the folder and this new page, with a long disclaimer and a single line to sign on, was placed before him.

"Now, this page is very important," said Clive, who'd laced his fingers together with renewed gravitas. "By signing here, you waive your opportunity to apply for temporal relocation."

There was that terrifying concept of 'relocation' again, but- "Wait, what do you mean, waive it?"

Clive leaned back in his chair and sighed deeply. "I had this same issue with Layton. Look." Separating his hands, he wearily lifted them for emphasis. "I want you to believe me when I say, in your case applying for relocation would be far more trouble than it's worth."

The sheer presumption of this deserved more than the scowl with which Luke responded. "Isn't that my decision to make?"

Clive threw his hands up in the air. "Oh yes! Of course! Naturally, this decision is ultimately up to you. Never mind that only a couple such applications have ever made it through the approval process, and those were in very extreme cases of actual time travel." Having raised his voice to accentuate this point, he settled into exasperated sincerity. "You only missed a decade! Just collect the extra bank interest and the compensation these remaining forms will ensure you and live out the rest of your life with a little asterisk at the end of your given age."

Well, now Luke really wasn't sure what to think.

"Or is there..." Clive tilted his head to one side. "...some problem? A health problem, for instance, that you may be experiencing?"

"I'm not 'experiencing' any health problems!" Luke caught himself before he said anything further. Acting irrationally was exactly what he needed to avoid here. "It's just... this whole situation is a lot to deal with. And, for the record, that 'previous experience' only made things worse." He faced Clive with a steady glare. "So, so much worse."

The impostor didn't meet his eyes. "I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be inconsiderate-"

Luke scoffed.

That made him look up. "Let me tell you the most likely scenario if - IF - you're approved for temporal relocation. A plan will be set in motion that minimizes changes to the known timeline of events. You will be sent back to a time as far after you and Layton were frozen as the time that has passed since you woke. You will then spend the next eleven years confined to a single floor of this building."

"What-?!"

"-to ensure no one notices you're not 'missing.' Of course, you can request that we contact up to five individuals during this time. Once they sign an NDA and agree to having all their emails and phone calls monitored AND a listening device on them every moment they're not in here, then they can visit you as long and as often as they like. When the moment you were sent back arrives and the wait is finally over, you'll be able to return home and try to explain to everyone who thought they knew what happened why you're suddenly a decade older." He shrugged. "But, hey, at least the numbers on your birth certificate will make sense."

"How is that in any way helpful?!"

Clive raised his eyebrows. "It's your decision. You tell me."

Luke tapped the pen on the desk in frustration. "Can't you make it so that - so that Layton and I don't go missing in the first place? There was a moment, eleven years ago, when we almost went back home, and-"

There was a sudden squeak, a tiny hoot of laughter. Clive was holding back a smile. "You want to change the timeline?"

"I mean-! To be honest I'm not really sure, but-!"

All traces of a smile left Clive's face. "But nothing. No one is ever going to sign off on that. Especially not for such a minor issue." After a moment of thought, he added, "No offense."

Luke leaned heavily on the back of the chair and crossed his arms. "The professor made it sound like we had a choice in this."

"Well, he didn't really give me much time to explain it to him," Clive sighed. "Once we'd finished the interview he just wanted to be left alone with the paperwork, so I left him alone. I only realized after he drove off that he'd left half the forms unsigned, with a little note at the end saying he'd think about it and come back later." His well-used office chair creaked as he recrossed his legs. "What in hell did he tell you?"

It was unclear whether this was a rhetorical question, but Luke intended to treat it like one. He scanned the document before him, trying to cut through the legalese and time-related jargon. It didn't mention exactly what 'relocation' might entail; this was just the form that would waive his ability to apply. "Is there a... guidebook for how incidents like this should be handled?"

Another sigh from Clive. "No. I'm speaking from personal experience here. I've seen how previous cases have been handled. I guess the wording on these forms can come off as pretty open-ended..." He took out another set of forms from the file, flipping through them with a concerned grunt. "We've been reusing these for the past however many years; maybe it's time for an update." He muttered something about budget allocations, having to hire a legal aide, and how to justify all this to his superiors, but immediately cut himself off when Luke signed the bottom of the document. "You're sure you don't want to try for temporal relocation?"

Luke slid the paper across the desk. "I think I've wasted enough time worrying about this. What happened happened. I'll manage."

Clive nodded, slipping the paper back into the file. "Good. And neither you nor anyone you know is going to develop regrets about this and try something stupid?"

Luke narrowed his eyes. How was he supposed to be able to promise that?

Clive flashed a brief smile. "I'm mostly joking. If someone had tried something we would've heard about it, and none of the recorded incidents from the past two decades are related to you. Well, except maybe for Aldebaran's little escape scheme, but you know how that turned out."

Aldebaran - the man who'd fallen into the river. That had been his name.

"But seriously, don't fuck around with time machines. They've done far more harm than good."

A barrage of other forms followed, all carefully explained by Clive, and less-carefully signed by Luke. Was he signing away any hope of recovering the time he'd missed? Probably; but it helped the reality of the situation sink in. When this was finished and he'd put his regrets behind him, he'd be sure to cherish what diminished time he and his loved ones might have left together.

A dark thought, but a motivating one.

When the paperwork had been completed and Luke could finally put the pen down, Clive returned the file to the cabinet with a satisfied flourish. "Well, that's that! You're free to go."

Luke wasted no time in standing up. "Right. Thanks for... being professional."

Clive answered with a wide and joyless grin. "I hope I never see you again."

"The feeling's mutual." He headed for the door.

"Oh! And I'll call Layton about the paperwork the moment you leave, so don't worry about that. Go live your life!"

"You too," answered Luke, whatever that was supposed to mean. He was already thinking of home.

After an exceedingly tedious drive, the car was back in its usual spot, and Luke realized he should've gotten flowers on the way. It would've been such a simple way to apologize to Marina! And besides, she loved flowers.

By the time he thought of taking some from the neighbours' garden, he was already through his front door and his wife had walked out of the hallway to greet him.

Nervously, he turned to her. "I'm sorry. I should've asked if you needed anything while I was out-"

With a laugh, she strode forward and pulled him into a kiss. Then she teased him: "What? But I thought I'd have to stay up half the night before you'd come back," and he burst into indignant laughter.

"That's not what 'the end of the day' means!"

"Well, how was I supposed to- the date doesn't change until midnight, you know!"

It seemed, for the next few hours, that everything was moving steadily back to normalcy. The afternoon was spent cleaning (in preparation for his parents' coming visit) and enjoying similar little exchanges with his wife. What had been years apart for her had still been several weeks of high-stakes travel for him (not to mention the stress of yesterday and the anxiety of that morning); and so, amidst the small talk was a sort of implied agreement: once the exhaustion from recent events and the relief of being reunited had worn off, then they could deal with the existential horror of the whole situation.

The first hint of trouble came later that evening. They had just finished dinner and were trying to put together a grocery list when the house phone rang. "That's probably my parents," Luke sighed at Marina, walking over to pick it up. Instead, he was greeted by the professor.

"Have you made your decision?"

It took a moment for Luke to remember what he could be talking about. "Oh! Er, yes. Yes, I decided not to go for the... relocation... option."

"I see."

Something in his tone pushed Luke to try to explain this decision. "Honestly, the way the, er, minister described how relocation would've worked sounded absolutely terrible." Marina was looking over at him, mildly confused. Covering the receiver for a moment, he whispered "It's the professor," in her direction. Her only reply was to raise her eyebrows and turn back to the unfinished list.

"The way the minister described it?"

"Yeah..." Luke carried the phone into his office, hopefully out of his wife's earshot, and directed a loud and furious whisper into the receiver. "You didn't tell me the Minister of Temporal Affairs was CLIVE DOVE-"

"But you took him at his word when he described the relocation process to you?"

An old, long-cultivated anxiety wrapped fresh tendrils around him. "Well, I- It didn't seem like he had much reason to lie about it-"

"The question isn't whether he had reason to lie, Luke. The question is, was he lying?"

No, no, this couldn't be happening again... "W-well, he- it was all very official; I read the forms," he lied, "and anyway, isn't it a government agency?"

"From what I can tell, this 'Ministry' of his has only the most tenuous connection to the government."

There had to be some way out of this! "He said that was because they didn't want to acknowledge the existence of the Ministry, as if it were embarrassing, or something-!"

"And we have little way of knowing whether that's true."

The ground was threatening to slip out from under him. "If it isn't true... then what did I sign? What do we do?!"

For what felt like several minutes, there was no reply.

"I plan to return to the building tomorrow morning, if you'd like to come along."

Luke sat up, tried to remove his arm from the space between the desk and the armrest it had fallen into when he'd collapsed into his office chair. When had that happened? He couldn't recall. "Er... well, unfortunately, Marina's expecting me to join her in running a bunch of errands tomorrow morning, so I'm afraid I won't be able to join you." The only way this situation could get worse, he figured, was if he disappeared on his wife again. Especially if it disrupted plans they'd made together, and especially if it meant trying to explain a situation to her that he didn't even have a full grasp of.

"I could wait until the afternoon."

The answer to that was easy. "No, I'm sorry; that's when my parents were planning on visiting." Couldn't the professor just go on his own? He was being oddly persistent about thi-

"Tonight, then?"

"Tonight," Luke repeated, incredulous.

The professor didn't quite pick up on his tone. "I'm on my way." And just like that, the line was dead.

Luke slumped back down in the chair, letting the hand holding the phone flop down past the armrest. Unfortunately his grip also loosened on the phone itself, sending it skittering loudly across the floor and underneath the desk. He responded to this with a louder, unhappier noise which had the side effect of catching his wife's attention.

"Is everything alright?"

She asked this from the doorway, in a calculatedly subdued tone which probably wouldn't have been audible from the other side of the call if the call were still going on. Luke wondered why she bothered, given that, at that moment, the phone was nowhere in sight and he was kneeling on the floor with one hand halfway under the desk.

"I dropped the phone," he explained, figuring he should start with the least-worrying subject and work his way up. Once the phone had been extracted, he added, "The professor's heading over here."

Marina was looking down at him in a strange and worrying way. "Why?" she asked, arms folded.

"He, um-" Luke debated getting up off the floor, but decided the effort was better used in trying to explain things without distressing his wife. "Have you heard of the Ministry of Temporal Affairs?"

Her eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

"They might've talked with you yesterday; they wanted me to go in and take care of some paperwork...?"

A slight and hesitant nod. "I think there was this one government guy..."

"Clive Dove? Greying hair? About your height?"

A sudden, eager nod. "Yeah! That's the guy. I had him show me his ID. He seemed a little sketchy."

Luke would've laughed if he weren't so worried. "Good call! He is a lot sketchy." Now, how should he explain the paperwork...?

Disconcerted by his pause, Marina tapped her foot. "So, why is Mr. Layton coming over?"

"Well, after I visited him earlier today I drove to the Ministry office and took care of the paperwork."

"Oh! And?"

"And... and that Clive guy might've been lying about it."

Her grip on her crossed arms tightened. "Lying about what?"

Good question. "I don't know. The paperwork? Everything."

"'Everything'?"

"There's a chance - which he claimed wasn't an option - that I could go back and undo what happened eleven years ago: the disappearance, the cryogenic freezing, everything! But earlier this afternoon I signed that chance away because he made it sound like it wouldn't be possible."

Marina slid down the doorframe and joined him, with an awkward thump, in sitting on the floor. "What do you mean, 'undo'-"

Luke waved a hand vaguely through the air. "Time travel."

She stared at him, dumbstruck.

"You know it was invented decades ago, right?"

She shook her head. "Well- but that's crazy; I never heard about-"

"People really don't like to talk about it, but it's true, I know that for a fact-" He cut himself off. It was clear, from her unguarded expression, that she was willing to believe him on this.

"Would you really want to go back?"

"Well, honestly, I don't know; but, I would at least like to know whether I have a choice. So... we're going to investigate this Ministry."

"Tonight?"

With caution, he nodded. "Yes. Tonight."

"Can I come with you?"

Before he could think of a way to dissuade her, she loudly cleared her throat and pulled herself off the floor.

"Sorry for asking. I'm coming with you."

Luke scrambled to his feet. "Wait, it might be dangerous-"

But she was already out of his office and down the hallway, checking she had everything she needed in her purse. She looked up only briefly as he caught up to her. "And it might be more dangerous if I don't come."

"That makes no sense! Last time-"

Nearly tearing the handles off her purse, she whipped around to face him. "'Last time' I wasn't with you! I got kidnapped and USED to coerce you into getting yourself frozen, and that wouldn't have happened if I had been with you!"

"That still doesn't make any-"

"Look, I don't care if it makes perfect sense or not! I don't want to be worrying about it for the next however many hours while you blindly throw yourself into danger. Again." Her voice cracked as if she were on the verge of crying, but her eyes looked perfectly dry. "So I'm coming with you. Unless you plan to tell me to my face that I'd only get in the way."

Where on earth had that come from? "Marina, I don't think that. I just don't want you to get hurt-"

She interrupted him with a piercing glare. "It's a little late for that."

...Oh.

It was strange - very strange - to consider that she might be hurt more by his absence than he was, given how many odd, distressing things he had been through in the past few weeks. But during that time - the full period of his absence - it was undoubtedly the case that she'd spent day after day (year after year!) not knowing when or even _if_ he'd return. It was a dizzying realization - one he had, on some level, been trying to avoid for the past 24 hours.

"I'm an idiot," he muttered. She didn't disagree. "Of course you can come."

In a matter of minutes they were sitting on the front steps, prepared for anything, watching other peoples’ lights flicker on. It wasn't dark yet, not even close; but, all around them, windows brightened as evening shadows lengthened over the street.

When Layton's car pulled up to the curb, Luke sprung forward out of habit to open the passenger-side door. But of course he knew that Marina followed behind him, so he merely reached through to unlock the car's rear door. Holding this open for her, he abandoned his usual seat in favour of joining her in the back.

The professor looked a little uneasy about her being there, but Luke was determined not to have _that_ discussion twice in one hour. "We're ready to go!" he said.

And so, they went.

"I trust you're apprised of the situation?" The professor glanced at Marina via the rearview mirror.

Marina answered with a sincere nod. "Absolutely."

The professor turned back to the road, but Luke now turned to her. "Do you know about Clive?"

"The minister guy? We just talked about this."

"No, I mean- the London terrorist attack, 20 years ago. He was the person behind that."

"What? Seriously?!"

She was waiting for an answer, so- "Yeah."

"How is he not in jail forever? Or, y'know-" after a couple indecipherable glances, she slid a thumb across her throat.

"Capital punishment was abolished decades ago," intoned the professor.

"And it sounds like he bought his way out of jail," Luke added, bitterly.

Marina frowned. "And he nailed down a government job?"

"Yeah; it sounded like even he wasn't certain how that happened," Luke sighed. "But I wouldn't take his word on that."

"Bribes," Marina muttered, nodding her head.

This cynical consensus must have bothered the professor, because he began to play devil's advocate. "Well, it did seem, the last time we saw him, that he intended to atone for his crimes. Perhaps he is genuinely dedicated to public service."

"I bet that went over well in his job interview," Marina muttered. Luke stifled a laugh.

"Or, consider," the professor persisted, "the old adage: 'Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.' Surely his position ensures he's under constant government scrutiny."

"That's assuming they keep a good eye on him," countered Luke, "which we can't be sure of-"

"-until we actually investigate." Marina had leaned back in the seat and crossed her arms, looking more than a little bored of this debate.

The professor smiled into the distance. "Indeed."

As they pulled into a parking space, the car's headlights swept over a dark-suited figure. Luke watched, scowling, as Clive shielded his eyes from the light, then rubbed them in disbelief as the professor stopped the car.

The impostor was still rooted to the spot when they disembarked, only taking a few steps backward when the professor approached (with Luke and Marina close behind him).

"I'm sorry," Clive said, making a gesture toward somewhere further down the sidewalk, "but could we do whatever this is some other time? If I don't get home soon I'll fall asleep at the wheel."

The professor didn't miss a beat. "Certainly. In the meantime, I would be happy to have a word with your superiors; unfortunately, I haven't been able to find to what 'superiors' your Ministry might report."

Having slowly edged over to one side of the sidewalk, Clive leaned up against the wall of the Ministry building. "Alternatively, we could continue this chat in my home."

"I'm afraid we're speaking at cross purposes. I simply wish to know which part of the government is responsible for overseeing the operations of your Ministry."

Clive sighed, crossing his arms. "And I'M afraid there's no easy answer to that. Just about everyone has a say in what this ministry does. That's why we so rarely end up doing anything." After a pointed glance at Luke, Clive's eyes focused on something behind where they were standing.

"Is there no one in particular you might recommend-"

"I hate to interrupt you, Professor," lilted Clive, who in truth seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself, "but I believe someone is trying to break into your car."

At once, Luke whirled around to catch sight of the thief, but he really shouldn't have bothered. The man was so preoccupied with picking the lock on the trunk that he hadn't even heard he'd been spotted.

"Hey!" barked Luke; and, oddly enough, he was answered by a bark.

A basset hound wormed its way out from under the car and headbutted the thief's legs. "Hey!" the dog yelped. "Can't you see you've been spotted?! Explain yourself now or we're toast!"

The thief's head snapped up in terror. He was a wide-eyed, weedy college kid who looked a little too well-dressed to have to resort to thievery, but you could never be too sure. Amidst a series of nervous hand motions, the thief stuttered something that sounded like 'good evening' and the start of an apology.

When it was clear this exchange was going nowhere fast, the professor spoke more gently to the thief. "Am I mistaken, or were we introduced last night?"

"No, you're absolutely bang-on, Mr. Layton, sir. We _were_ introduced last night!"

The professor sighed. "You're one of Katrielle's friends."

The thief flushed as red as the car he was still standing stiffly behind. "O-oh, no, I wouldn't go _that_ far, sir; I'm merely Ms. Layton's assistant. Ernest Greeves." He concluded this, for some reason, with an awkward little bow. "And- and, it was she, actually, who told me to pick this lock, sir, on account of the fact that she has, somewhat inadvertently, locked herself in the boot of your car."

A slight movement at the edge of Luke's vision diverted his attention. There, in the shadow of the wall, was a door which a shady figure was slowly prying open. Taking advantage of the unexpected distraction, Clive had slunk behind them and unlocked a side door of the building, through which he clearly intended to escape.

Luke could not allow that to happen. Giving no indication to anyone of what he was doing, he launched himself toward the door, sticking one shoe and one elbow through just as Clive tried to slam it behind him. Was it painful? Yes, but it meant he could wrench the door back open and pursue the impostor down the corridor.

If his wife or the professor called after him, he didn't hear them. He had to focus on anything that might happen ahead. The moment the impostor realized Luke had followed him in, he broke into a sprint and turned the nearest corner, shoes slipping on the uneven linoleum. When Luke turned the corner himself, the impostor seemed to have disappeared; the open door of the nearest office suggested where he might have gone. But that was, of course, too obvious - the slight flicker of a shadow down a side corridor showed where the impostor had actually fled. Stealthily, Luke approached the corridor and took one glance, far below head level, to confirm his suspicion.

The impostor was walking, as quickly and quietly as possible, toward a door that let out on the opposite side of the building.

Only once he heard the tiny click of that door opening did Luke take another look, watching as the impostor swept out of the building and into the night.

Luke covered the length of the corridor in a matter of seconds, then slowly cracked open the door. The impostor rounded a corner of the building without noticing him; and so, Luke hurried to that corner next.

Clive's car was parked a little closer to the side of the building its owner had originally been approaching it from, but it was just as conveniently reached from this side. With a flippant little flourish, Clive took out his keys and made the mistake of unlocking his passenger-side door to deposit his attaché case carefully on the seat. As he circled the front of the car to take his seat at the wheel, Luke pelted down the sidewalk and swung through the unlocked door, swiping the case onto the car floor.

Halfway to the ignition, Clive's keys fell out of his hand, jingling in concert with a barrage of sudden, startled cursing.

"No!" was the first coherent thing Clive said. "Absolutely fucking not! Get out of my car!"

Jittery with adrenaline, Luke quietly fastened his seat belt, having laid the attaché case and his own bag in the back seat. It was his turn to be smug. "You suggested we continue this 'chat' at your place?"

With a long and hoarse-throated sigh, Clive picked up the keys and started the car. "And I suppose everyone else will just squish into the back seat?"

Luke reached back and dug quickly through his bag, removing the cell phone Marina had insisted he bring along. "Of course not; I'll send them directions."

Clive shut his eyes for several seconds and seemed to be counting to ten. "Alright," he finally conceded. The car swung violently into the road.

Once the cell phone had turned on, it buzzed with urgency: 3 missed calls from Marina, and a text she'd sent asking "where are you??"

The car jolted to a halt at an intersection; Luke took quick note of the street signs. Clumsily opening the phone, he typed: "Caught up with Clive. En route to his place. Tell prof please follow: white sedan heading north on Horseferry Rd. Will update as we go." Then he put the phone to one side; the car was moving again.

"So, remind me," scowled Clive, swiping his hair out of his eyes, "why you, plural, felt the need to corner me on the way back to my car."

"We're investigating your so-called 'Ministry.'" This was met with a side-glance from Clive. "Catching you on your way out was just a coincidence."

Clive splayed his hands over the steering wheel in what was either a stretch or a shrug. "Alright, sure."

"We just need to be certain you're not lying."

"I swear to God, if you accuse me of trying the same stupid plan a second time..."

"Not about that!" Luke glowered. "About the paperwork."

"The paperwork?" Clive turned onto a different street, so Luke had to reopen the phone.

There was a fourth missed call from his wife now. With a sigh, he added, "Sorry. Can't talk," to his update on the car's location and turned back to the conversation at hand. "When you were directing me through that 'temporal displacement' paperwork, you said changing the past wouldn't be possible. I..." Brake lights flashed red in front of them; the car jerked to a halt. "...don't believe you."

Clive laid his forehead on the steering wheel, emitted a long groan. "Why not?"

"Well, you're not known for telling the truth."

The impostor peeled his face off the wheel just in time to see that the cars ahead had begun moving again. He brought his own back up to a steady speed. "So, you, Layton, and... and..." He snapped his fingers. "Flora?"

"Flora?!"

"-The woman you were with."

"Marina," Luke corrected him, then added, cautiously, "my wife."

Clive was noticeably taken aback. "Congratulations, I suppose. So you, your wife, and Layton decide, the day after two-thirds of you have woken up from a decade-long cryostasis, that your most pressing issue is whether I was wrong to suggest that one should avoid going through the same ordeal in reverse."

"That- That is NOT what you suggested!"

One of his hands swept up from the steering wheel in exasperation. "So what did _you_ think I suggested?"

"You suggested we didn't have a choice!"

"Well, yes; functionally, you don't."

"See! That's exactly the reason we don't trust you! You keep saying that so dismissively; how are we supposed to decide for ourselves?!"

"What is your obsession with making a decision?! You have no idea- SHIT!" Another car had swooped in front of them, forcing Clive to slam on the brakes. With a shake of his head, Clive continued: "You have NO idea how much hell any given trip through time might put you through, and neither - this is the important part - do I. I can't even guarantee the time machine itself won't kill you. Nor can I guarantee that anything you try to do with it will actually work. Maybe if you knew how to prevent a war or something..." He turned another corner; Luke typed out another update. "But just to prevent yourself and Layton from going missing...?"

"It's not only about us going missing," Luke protested. "It's about everyone we know spending years unsure whether we were dead, while we..." he gestured vaguely at his unfrozen self. "We came out of this basically unharmed."

A very strange noise came from Clive then, something in between a grunt, a sigh, and a laugh. His expression softened considerably. "You are not 'basically unharmed.'"

"RELATIVELY unharmed, then. I mean, for heaven's sake-!"

"Alright, I get it." With uncharacteristic slowness, Clive shook his head. "You're concerned about your family."

"Yes!" Was this such a foreign concept to him? "Yes, I am."

"They've been in some form of grief for the past decade, and you feel guilty about it."

There was a hint of contempt in his voice. Luke frowned. "Yes, I suppose I do. What's your point?"

"Just... trying to figure out how to approach this."

Luke considered asking what on earth he meant by that; but, in all honesty, he wasn't sure he had the patience to process the answer. It was probably rude to think so, but this conversation felt more like talking to an animal than to another person: there was a similar amount of translation involved.

"Look..." Clive sighed, staring out at the road. He seemed focused on a point far beyond the car in front of him. "If you're really more concerned about your family's well-being than your own, it sounds to me like you've got more to lose than you think you do. And your family would lose a lot if you gambled on a successful time-jump and lost, or had to hide what you'd done from them for the rest of your life. Please believe me on this. You do not want to get involved in this time travel shit."

"Why don't you just tell us what's going on with your Ministry?"

Clive gave no response to this.

They had gotten out of the densest part of the city now; buildings here were older, and slightly more separated. And meanwhile the sky had darkened; up and down the road headlights and streetlights were flicking on. Clive fumbled around the dashboard, turned his car's lights on manually, muttered something about autumn. The rest of the drive passed in almost complete silence.

Clive's home, it turned out, was a boring little house in a boring little corner of a boring little suburban neighbourhood. It looked a little nicer than your typical suburb, maybe, (a little older, a little more well-kept, probably much more expensive,) but its most remarkable feature was its unremarkability. This was not the sort of place where notorious things happened. And yet it was here that this eminently notorious man parked his car.

As Luke typed in the final address, Clive snatched his attaché case from the backseat. "Here we are," he snapped - pointed redundancy. Just to spite him, Luke took his time getting out of the car. With a glance up the road - yes! There was the professor's car. Thank goodness; they hadn't been far behind. He waited on the front path to greet them.

Marina reached him first. "What HAPPENED?!" She'd burst out of the rear door, still clutching her phone, far from pleased.

Luke tried to fend her off as she approached. "He was escaping through the building! I couldn't let him get away."

"So you just ran without saying anything?"

"I thought I'd lose him if I said anything! I'm sorry... It did work though, didn't it? I mean, we're here."

She sighed, putting a hand on his arm. "I guess..."

Beyond her, the professor emerged from his car and turned toward Luke with a relieved smile. Luke smiled hesitantly back.

He hoped he'd done the right thing.

Clive was waiting in the open doorway, having turned a few lights on inside. One hand on the doorframe, both eyes on his guests, he waited for the procession to cross his lawn.

And it was a procession - Luke and Marina, still connected, had something of a head start; they picked their way cautiously up the front path. Next came the professor, who reached the sidewalk just before his daughter flung wide the passenger-side door; she stepped out of the car with the poise of a duchess. And that Ernest person took up the rear, scooting across the backseat with the dog in his arms, avoiding setting foot in the street. Their host stood by with a bemused expression as this menagerie crossed his threshold, filing them into a small but well-furnished parlour.

It was, in truth, a little too well-furnished. Every chair, table, and cabinet was made of elaborately-carved antique wood. Half of the chairs were upholstered with velvet; every lampshade was stained glass. Taken together, the furniture in this one room might've been worth more than the house it sat in. Luke exchanged an uncertain glance with his wife and settled on the room's singular couch, which, as it turned out, was even less comfortable than it looked.

After everyone else had sat down and been offered something to drink, Clive brought in a much plainer chair from some other part of the house and set it close to the doorway. "So, am I to understand you _all_ have a stake in this?"

Marina nodded silently, and Luke followed her lead, though his investment in this conversation was pretty obvious.

"I don't," grunted the dog. Ernest frowned at it.

It was Katrielle who gave the most definitive answer: "That is indeed the case, Mr. Dove." She'd been staring him down fearlessly from her seat directly across the room.

Out of either amusement or annoyance, Clive turned to the professor. "I see you picked up a couple hitchhikers on your way over."

The professor didn't have time to respond.

"I'll have you know I picked myself up," Katrielle snipped, "and there is almost as much at stake here for humanity at large as there is for those directly involved in incidents of temporal displacement."

She looked ready to say more, but a slight movement of her father's arm caught her attention. Answering this with a slight nod, she allowed him to speak.

"I've investigated your 'Ministry of Temporal Affairs' to the best of my ability," the professor concluded. "I would like to hear your description of its operations."

With a sigh, Clive leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs and addressed the room. "What, specifically, do you want to know?"

Luke was too annoyed by this clearly-feigned cluelessness to even begin piecing together a question before Katrielle shattered the uneasy silence. "Have you really been letting people go back in time to change the past?!"

"No!" Clive scoffed. "God no! No one's ever allowed it. They wouldn't even let me-" He cut himself off.

Luke jumped in before he could continue. "Wouldn't let you what?"

Mouthing a curse, Clive closed his eyes. "Thirty years on, everyone's insistent on keeping the invention of time travel a secret. Don't want to risk starting a- some sort of temporal arms race; that's what they say. And that's perfectly solid reasoning, but-"

He was obviously trying to gloss over his slip-up. "What did you try to change?!"

Luke was answered with an exasperated glare from Clive. "Nothing! I tried to change nothing! What I have been TRYING to do is convince ANYONE above my position that the fact that TIME TRAVEL IS POSSIBLE should've been made public YEARS ago!"

"What?" Luke turned to the professor.

He was frowning. "It still hasn't been made public?"

There was a laugh from Katrielle. "What? No, of course it's public!"

Clive rolled his eyes. "As public as intelligent life on Mars."

Katrielle's eyes sparkled. "Ah! Do Martians actually exist, too?"

"God, I hope not." And after a reflective shake of his head, Clive added, "-for their sake."

"Wait-" Marina started, but Ernest had spoken up at the same time. Before he noticed and cut himself off out of politeness, she'd already raised her voice and plowed over him. "There's no way that could've been kept a secret for so long. The more people who know about a conspiracy..."

Wearily, Clive nodded. "That's why it hasn't been kept a secret. It's been kept impossible to definitively prove."

A clatter came from across the room; the dog had knocked something onto the floor, and Katrielle, ignoring this, grinned conspiratorially around the room, announcing, "It can't be 'impossible'-"

Marina joined in. "That's what I'm saying! Sometime in the past thirty years something or someone would've exposed the whole cover-up scheme. What's REALLY going on?"

"The benefit of time travel," Clive growled, "is that those sorts of mistakes can be corrected as they happen - or prevented beforehand - as many times as necessary."

An uneasy stillness settled over the room. Somewhere in an adjacent room, a clock was ticking, slow and deliberate, out of time with the beating of Luke's heart. He offered his hand to his wife and she took it almost immediately. They were in the thick of it now. Again.

The professor's ever-steady voice made its way through the still air. "What role does your Ministry play in this ongoing conspiracy?"

Slowly nodding, as if this were exactly the question he'd been expecting, Clive answered him. "Not a very large one, as far as I can tell. We don't even keep a time machine with us; it's all handled very indirectly. We're told the location and time of relevant incidents a week in advance; I go out, find whoever's involved, and guide them through the paperwork; then my secretary hands a copy off to whoever asks for one. I believe-" Clive put a hand to his tie. "-and this is just speculation, but I believe we're actually working with the _future_ government."

Another few moments of silence. What Clive was claiming sounded speculative, certainly, but unfortunately it also made a little sense. He'd given the professor a good explanation - a believable story - but a story was all it really was. And the way he'd composed it gave him an excellent excuse for not proving anything.

Luke frowned. "Why are you telling us this?"

"Because you asked."

"Seriously?" Marina shifted uncomfortably on the uncomfortable couch. "No one else has asked?"

"No one else has been this persistent." After a glance out the window, Clive directed an especially displeased eyeroll at Luke. "For heaven's sake, I thought I'd gotten rid of you this morning."

Luke didn't want to admit that he had, in fact, almost been gotten rid of.

"-But then you ambushed me on my way home from work and took yourself hostage so he-" Clive waved a hand at the professor. "-could interrogate me. At some point, trying to misdirect you people isn't worth the effort."

Katrielle flashed an encouraging grin at Luke. His wife frowned back at her, with the slightest squeeze of Luke's hand.

"Besides," sighed Clive, "my superiors have been a little lax these last couple years, and I'm getting tired of making up for the mistakes they've been leaving behind. They didn't tell me, for instance, about your situation; I got _that_ notification from _myself_."

It only took a second for Luke to realize how Clive would've had to deliver such a message. "I thought you didn't keep a time machine with you!"

The slightest smile crossed Clive's face. "I told you my superiors have been a little lax lately."

"So you-!" The entire room was holding its breath.

The impostor sighed and shook his head. "I wish I knew how I'll end up doing it! I'd like to take care of sending that note before I forget. Although, on second thought, I suppose there's no chance I'll forget." Then he shrugged. A tense shrug. An unnatural shrug. "Is there anything else you want to know?" His eyes scanned the room eagerly.

Luke frowned at this change in the impostor's demeanour. "If - _as you said!_ \- none of this can be definitively proven, how can we believe you on any of this?"

Clive, having glanced out the window again, turned back to the room with frantic relief. "You can't! And, honestly, you shouldn't. The world is complicated enough as is." He grinned at Luke.

Fortunately, the professor found this equally unnerving. "Is there something you haven't yet told us?"

"No, I think I've told you everything I know! I just want you to know," he chuckled darkly, "If I die in the next few minutes, it's entirely your fault."

"What?"

It was impossible to tell who'd said 'what' - or, more accurately, who hadn't said it, apart from the man who sat by the door, shoulders shaking, hands braced against his knees. "Honestly, I'm surprised no one's come to interrupt this... this travesty yet."

"Interesting choice of words..." muttered Katrielle, with almost theatrical thoughtfulness. "This being a 'travesty' would seem to imply that you're still distorting the truth."

"I don't know enough about the truth to not distort it!" Clive snapped. "And, holy hell, what even IS truth when the past - everything we thought we knew - could be changed at the whim of some bastards in the future who may or may not care what we think about it?!"

"Now, calm down a moment, Clive..." the professor began, but Clive waved him off and stood, seeming to have calmed himself down on his own.

"You said you wanted to talk to my superiors; I imagine they'll be coming here any time now to fire me. Or fire AT me, as they did to the previous Minister of Temporal Affairs after... similar circumstances." With a deep sigh, he indicated the door. "Personally, if you value your lives, I recommend that you leave."

There was a hand-squeeze from Marina again. "Luke-"

He'd been paying so much attention to the rest of the room that this startled him. What was it she wanted from him? Surely she couldn't be taking this seriously. "He's just trying to get us to leave so he can rethink his plan."

As he said this, Katrielle made a much louder quip to the same effect which Luke didn't quite catch.

As if she were responding to both of them, Marina raised her voice. "I'm not so sure-"

"For fuck's sake! I do NOT have a plan!" Clive raved from the doorway. "What the hell would I have to gain from making up any of this?!"

The professor's words from earlier echoed in Luke's mind: 'The question isn't whether he had reason to lie...'

But the professor's voice interrupted this train of thought, and contradicted it. "Clive, you said yourself that you want to bring the existence of time travel into the public eye. It's not difficult to imagine all this as another elaborate charade - an attempt to persuade us to help further your own agenda."

Clive's mouth hung open for a moment. Furious, yet frozen to the spot, he struggled to reply. "How do you do that?!"

Silence.

"How do you take everything you've seen and heard in the past, I don't know, 24 hours and rearrange it to fit into what you want to believe about me? How do you manage," Clive squawked, "to remain so aloof when reality itself is at stake?!"

"I see little reason to believe that 'reality itself' is, in fact, at stake."

"What are you talking about?! You know time travel is possible-"

"-and I don't think there's much you can do about that fact, or the fact that it hasn't been made public, even with the help of two to five others."

"I'M NOT ASKING FOR YOUR HELP!" Clive leaned heavily on the door frame, swept his increasingly frazzled hair out of his eyes. "I'm just trying to do my job! That's all this is! You travel through time, I fill out the forms. You ask any questions? I give you some answers. You chase down a conspiracy I’m involved with? I try not to die! Would you get off my case?!"

"We still don't know for certain whether this job you’re trying to do actually exists."

"Do you think I'd want to risk my life on another harebrained scheme to change the world? Do you think I'd want to risk going to jail for setting up a fake government agency? I can't affor-" His eyes wandered around the room, settling uneasily on each aristocratic piece of furniture. Then they rolled. "I can't express to you how insulted I am that you think I'm that stupid."

The professor remained unfazed. "Clive, these explanations of yours mean very little without solid proof."

"Alright, fine!" the impostor finally snapped. "You want proof?!" With one furious motion, he swept his attaché case up from the floor and flipped it open, retrieving a well-used notebook. "I'll find you some proof." Tearing the cap off a pen, he muttered the day's date to himself, then scribbled furiously across the top of the page. He glared suddenly across the room. "What time is it?"

"19:36," Katrielle answered with poorly-hidden excitement.

"Nineteen... thirty... seven," muttered Clive, with a glance at his own watch.

For a moment after his pen left the page, all was quiet. But it wasn't quite as still as before; Ernest hesitantly moved to sit a little taller, managing to produce only two querulous words: "What, exactly-" before he was interrupted.

A loud thud had come from Luke's right - somewhere behind the house.

Clive swore under his breath, eyes widening. "We're dead."

It was a couple seconds before anyone thought to move. This wasn't purely out of shock, of course; Clive was standing in the doorway, apparently paralyzed with fear, blocking the only route out of the room. But a knock from the back door snapped him out of his trance and into a frantic calmness. He straightened his tie.

"That's probably for me," he coughed. And with an anxious grimace, he stepped into the unlit hallway.

By the time Luke and Marina had scrambled to their feet, Clive had already vanished into the darkness, with Katrielle in hot pursuit and Ernest dragged, protesting faintly, behind her. Her father called her name in vain, hastily following where she led. And, after an exchange of helpless glances, Luke and Marina followed suit.

As it turned out, they didn't have far to go. Clive was pushed up against a wall near the end of the hallway, where it opened into a larger room - a kitchen, probably, given what little Luke could see from around the wall and behind nearly everyone else. The knock at the back door came again.

Clive cast a despairing glance over the small gathered crowd. "You really should leave-"

"Not a chance," Katrielle whispered back. Luke was beginning to resent how quickly she answered everyone. He hadn't had a chance-

From the back door came the jingle of keys and some indistinct muttering, then the sound of a key turning in the lock. The unseen door opened. "Hel-lo!" an irritated voice shouted.

"Holy hell," muttered Clive, hazarding a glance around the corner. The voice had been his.

"Oh for heaven's sake, come out here," the other Clive demanded. "I'm not going to murder anyone."

If Luke had to be honest - and, in all honesty, what other choice did he have - it was at this point that he really lost a grasp on the situation. When everyone had shifted forward enough that he actually got a good look into the kitchen, it was clear that there were, in fact, two Clives occupying the room, one trying frantically to confirm how little danger he was in, and the other trying to figure out what was meant by the hastily-scribbled notebook message the first had left him. The professor remained steadfast in his silent suspicion while his daughter needled the Clives from the sidelines, probably hoping one would say something that would reveal him as an impostor - an impostor of the impostor - and her 'assistant,' Ernest, gibbered quietly in her wake.

This left Luke and his wife free to completely disengage from what was going on for a couple delirious minutes. They stared at the chaos in the kitchen, they stared at one another, and when Katrielle at last announced that she saw very little possibility for deception, and her father agreed, Luke had just enough time to assure his wife that yes, time travel had definitely always been possible, before the visiting Clive pointed vaguely at something outside the window and invited everyone to come take a look at the thing.

"I'm still at a loss," Ernest stammered as, after another dizzying exchange, everyone made their way through the back door and onto a porch.

For the first time that evening, Luke found himself sympathizing with Katrielle’s strange friend. "Don't worry," he sighed. "Everyone is."

In the centre of the lawn, on a patch of recently-blackened grass, behind a fading cloud of steam, sat a large and incredibly uninteresting Thing. It was a sort of rectangular room, about the size of a large car, with windows in the places you'd expect, but no discernable means of moving in any direction. In fact, the windows were the only features one's eyes could easily focus on. Every corner was rounded, all six surfaces slightly convex; every part of the outside that wasn't glass was the dullest possible shade of grey. Amidst the brick walls, sloped roofs, and unevenly-trimmed hedges of the surrounding suburbia, it couldn't have looked more alien.

"By the end of the month," the Clive who'd led them to the Thing was saying, "everything will have gone public. The feasibility of time travel, the operations of our Ministry, and the eventual invention of these." He patted the side of the Thing. "Reasonably reliable... time machines. But we only have access to these," he added, "thanks to cooperation with a future government."

Luke resented having to hear any of this nonsense.

With a swipe of his hand, the visiting Clive slid one section of the Thing to one side. "So, prepare yourselves," he quipped, whirling round to address the small crowd from the world's uncanniest stage. "In just a few weeks you will be living in a post-temporal society."

"Not so fast!" interjected Katrielle. Before Clive could even think of closing the Thing's strange door, she'd already strided forward and taken a seat on one of the benches inside. "Let's see this future of yours."

"Katrielle-" the professor stepped forward to retrieve her.

But she'd already scooted further in to make room for her assistant. "We still haven't talked to his superiors yet!"

The visiting Clive looked mildly concerned, but stepped clear of the doorway. "I mean, if you insist-"

"I do," Katrielle grinned.

As Ernest scrambled to sit next to her, and the professor stepped carefully through the door, Luke knew their attention would surely turn to him next. It was he, this time, who squeezed his wife's hand for support. Despite the alluring strangeness of the Thing on the lawn, she hadn't moved at all since stepping out onto the porch. And from the look on her face, she felt no inclination to.

Of course, she'd probably - definitely - go if he went, but he wasn't certain _he_ wanted to. He hadn't paid enough attention to what either of the Clives had been saying; he had no real understanding of the situation; this whole 'time travel' thing just didn't seem real to him. And maybe that was a good instinct; maybe it wasn't real, but it could also mean, as before, that he simply didn't want to believe the truth. And hadn't he struggled enough with the truth for one day?

His wife returned the glance he hadn't realized he'd just given her. It was curious, and reassuring, and fearful. She'd be his anchor. She'd be his excuse for staying out of the epicentre of this latest mess. Luke took a step back, heard himself call out across the lawn: "Someone's got to stay behind..."

"Well, you heard the man, Ernest," Katrielle nudged her assistant off the end of the bench. "Go keep an eye on Shady Fellow No. 1."

Luke spoke over the resulting feeble protests. "No, what I mean is I'll-" he remembered his wife. "- _we'll_ stay behind. We have other things to take care of, and-" He didn't want to say it, but who knew how long the others would be gone? What they'd go through? Whether or not they'd even return?

There was a nod from the professor.

"Good luck," he said.

Then the door slid closed, and they were gone.

It was astonishingly sudden. There was no light, no noise, just a sudden complete lack of existence. Fresh steam curled up from the lawn.

Small noises slowly crept in from their surroundings. Crickets returned to their chorus. Cars rushed by on distant roads. A cold breeze rustled the leaves in the hedges.

His wife hesitantly leaned closer. "What do we do now? Is it over?"

"I-" Luke looked over at the remaining Clive, who stared blankly at the spot where the Thing had just sat. No answers there. "I think so," he ventured warily.

Completely still but for his face, Clive sighed. "I hope for their sakes that that really was me."

This had to be dismissed outright. "I mean, they sounded fairly certain-"

"You can never be too certain," Clive insisted, facing Luke with an uneasy grimace.

Marina jumped in as if to save him. "Come on, there's got to be a point where the paranoia has to stop."

With deliberate silence, Clive turned back toward the withered grass. "You'd think they'd have returned by now."

Marina scowled.

"I mean, it's a time machine." Clive cleared his throat. "Theoretically, they could come back whenever they like."

They watched the lawn for a few long minutes. No Thing, nor steam, nor thudding noise came to fill the empty space. The last hints of light left the clouded sky, and despite her jacket Marina started shivering. It was decided that they'd wait inside.

For an hour or two, they did just that. Clive offered them drinks and not much else; he wrote more numbers in the notebook he'd used before, to no avail. He wondered aloud if any of these additional notes had been on the page the other Clive had showed them. Neither Luke nor Marina could remember.

Time passed excruciatingly slowly. There was little anyone wanted to say to one another - or, in the case of Luke and his wife, anything they'd want to say in the presence of Clive Dove - and nothing else to do but wait. They blinked wearily in the dim light of the parlor; Clive seemed constantly on the verge of dozing off; Marina's head sank slowly to one side, eventually coming to rest on Luke's shoulder. Luke himself was unable to relax. At any moment, the Thing could thud back into the twice-vaporized spot behind Clive's house, and they'd all have to find their place in whatever reality was brought back with it. And yet the stillness persisted.

When that clock in the other room chimed a second time, shaking Clive from what had definitely been a nap, Luke decided he'd had enough. In a clear a voice as he could manage, he addressed their host. "Could-" Clive flinched so violently in reaction to this that Luke thought he should probably start over. "Would you mind calling us if- when they come back?"

Nodding sleepily, Clive pulled himself to his feet. "Sure. Er. I mean, of course I wouldn't mind. I'll give you my number."

Luke tried to nudge his wife awake without startling her. "Actually, you'll need OUR number."

"Right." Clive continued writing obliviously for a moment, then suddenly stopped mid-scribble. "Yes, of course." With an embarrassed grunt, he handed the half-used notepad to Luke. "Should I call you a cab?"

Luke hesitated, but Marina was just awake enough to murmur her assent.

"Oh, and- and who knows," Clive added, on his way to the phone, "they could've gotten dropped off halfway across the city. I'm sure you'll hear from them whenever - wherever they reappear."

The professor's car was visible through the parlour windows, sitting, vacant, in the street. For a moment, Luke couldn't take his eyes off it. "Yes, I'm sure we will."

Faint sounds of a phone conversation drifted out from somewhere down the hallway. From her seat by his side, Marina stretched, yawned, and muttered, "Another restless night."

Luke caught himself trying to meet her eyes, almost let out a laugh. "It's only 9 pm."

"Really?" She stifled another yawn. "It's a... a restless day, then."

"Tomorrow will be a restless day, too..."

She looked drowsily over at him. "What? Why?"

"Well, there's that shopping we had to do, and some more cleaning, I think... and my parents...!" -and the waiting, he added silently. Waiting to hear whether the professor and company had safely returned.

"Oh, you're right. Hmm..." sighed Marina. Now she was staring out the window. "Imagine if we had left, too."

Luke's head sank toward her shoulder. "I think I'd rather not."

Footsteps from the hallway marked the end of Clive's time on the phone. "They're on their way."

"What?! Did the professor just call?"

"What?" For a moment, Clive looked very confused; then he shook his head. "No, I meant your cab's on its way."

Luke sank slowly back onto the couch. "Oh. Thanks."

"It's the least I could do," muttered Clive, returning hesitantly to his chair. "Almost literally the least I could do. If there's anything else you think I could do to help-"

"No." The reply came from him more suddenly and firmly than Luke expected, but that wasn't entirely unwarranted, he thought.

And Marina agreed: "I think it's out of our hands now."

The ride home was drowsy, and quiet, and dark. A burning sensation had flared up at the back of Luke's eyes; it took him a while to realize this was because they were straining to read the dimly-lit road signs. Irritated, he forced his eyes closed. There wasn't any need for that now.

Their home was exactly as they'd left it - a little messy still, the doormat askew. They dropped their shoes by the front door and were on their way to their room when Luke paused to turn the light on in the hallway.

He had forgotten, earlier in the day, that the switch was closer to the front door than their bedroom, and thankfully so - the light was unbearably bright. His wife shielded her eyes and hurried on for the sake of reaching a dimmer light, but Luke called her back to where he was standing.

"Did you move these since this morning?"

Marina squinted in the direction he'd indicated. "You mean the paintings?"

"Yes."

After a careful look over each of them, she closed her eyes to the light. "No, they're in the right place."

"So you-"

"I might've got into painting while you were gone. Someone told me it'd be therapeutic..." She shrugged, which he recognized as an attempt to hide her embarrassment. "But I'm not very good-"

"No, they're fine!" He tried to comfort her. "A little abstract, but-" This comment prompted a small laugh from her. As her laugh faded, he turned off the light. "But perfectly readable."

In a silly flower-based cipher they'd invented before they were engaged, the paintings spelled out a message: _Keep smiling through just like you always do._

"I know, it's really cheesy," she blushed as he entered the room, "but anything more serious would’ve gotten unbearable to see every day-"

He told her that he understood.

The next day passed with no surprises, and the next day, and the next. His parents were frantic, but not inconsolable; the boxes of mail were gradually sorted through, agonized over, and for the most part discarded; slowly, everything was adjusted to fit the new normal.

Towards the end of the month, a newer normal thrust itself upon them.

It was as the other Clive had said: documents were released definitively proving the government's use of time travel. Subsequently, there was a rush to justify this across nearly every media outlet, and a movement to retroactively establish laws that the future had proven necessary. Clive spent a significant amount of time in the news, replying to questions and accusations with increasing desperation until finally resigning from his position. And at last, the professor and Katrielle extricated themselves from the mess and returned, with comparatively little fanfare, to their business. There was chaos and uproar and a sort of worldwide existential crisis...

And for once, Luke had nothing to do with it.


End file.
